by Anuradha Bakshi | Jun 12, 2005 | Uncategorized
one heart has been mended, one kid is back on course…
a bunch of sparkling eyed kids are busy studying…
another lot are busy learning the rules of living in our world..
little stars shine as they learn their numbers and letters..
a planet continues its charted course…
but there is another side of WHY
the one that never ceases to question and look for answers
if you look closely at aditya, the little fellow on the picture you will see a little face filled with questions that seem not to have any answers: here are some
why did my father die ?
why is everyone so nasty to my mother?
why did no one give me medicine when my face was hurting so much?
why do i hear my mama weep at night?
and the list is endless
aditya’s mama is 19, aditya is not even 2. the father died of brain fever last year. his family threw aditya and his mother out. aditya lives with his maternal grandmother who can barely make both ends meet.
we cannot spend time wondering why (!) we need to do something… and we did.
after getting aditya the medical help he needed (injectable antibiotics) we decided to help Neha find a tomorrow and thanks to friends today Neha attends a beautician course at the Shanaz Hussain School and will one day get a job and maybe her own parlour… though we are still looking for a kind heart to sponsor the course material which is quite expensive (4K!) and the monthly bus fare.
And every morning , as Neha sets out on the road of her new life, little aditya sits in our creche working out all the little unworded questions that crowd his tender mind.
And the one question I know bothers him the most is: when will mama smile again!
by Anuradha Bakshi | Jun 8, 2005 | Uncategorized
Arun’s operation is over and God willing he will get better by quantum leaps: children have an uncanny way of making up for lost time!
But for us at project why the task is not over. It never is.
We do not believe in full stops. Everything that happens, every incident that comes our way, every moment carries in it the seed of something new: that is what I like calling the WHY ruse.
Be it an award received, a task completed, a child healed, an exam success: they are all made to be touched by this ruse
So if a new support group saw the light with arun’s operation it now becomes a moot point for much more. Sometimes the ruse is only relevant within project why, but the litmus test is when one can draw in unlikely and unsuspecting candidates!
If those who generously adorned one with unsollicited awards agreed to walk that one extra step, one could do so much more.
And what makes it more interesting is that the ruse works both ways: does it not make us at project why also responsible of being worthy of what was received?
Think about it
by Anuradha Bakshi | Jun 6, 2005 | Uncategorized
Two recent occurrences set me thinking about the new lucrative field that I will just call giveBizMess and the new meaning of words like ‘giving’,’charity’ and their XXI st century mutations ‘development causes’ and ‘NGO sector’ etc..
A quick glance at history and quotes from the world over read like:
The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall; but in charity there is no excess, neither can angel or man come in danger by it. Francis Bacon
or
If you haven’t got any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble. Bob Hope
or
Charity never humiliated him who profited from it, nor ever bound him by the chains of gratitude, since it was not to him but to God that the gift was made. Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The list is endless, but there is one common thread and that is that giving is a one way street and not a business transaction with strings tied to it.
My half a century journey on this planet has shown me time and again that when we humans are uncomfortable with something we tend to marginalise it and kick it off the mainstream. Hence one who does not play by today’s rule is at once branded as ‘silly’ ‘stupid’ and more of the same.
Now to come back to the two incidents that started this stream of thought, one is the unending stream of donations tagged ‘tsunami’, whereby people or institutions have unleashed a wave of giving bigger than a tsunami wave, and that is also likely to have as negative an impact.
The second incident is the one that began by a simple offer to help a child and has also unleashed a rather incomprehensible stream of events where one child’s case has brought to light the ugly or rather sad connotations that charity assume in our day and age.
I think one needs to be ‘charitable’ in dealing with these issues or otherwise one is at risk of being drawn into the givBizMess Syndrome where the one who gives takes on the bigger role defeating the act of giving itself.
What a bit of humour would lead one to ask is:
How come people who normally do not find the time, inclination or need to part with a few coins for simple day-to-day activities such as education, nutrition or old age care – to name a few – to people around them, acquire an impatient eagerness to do the same when a tsunami (word unknown till 26-12-04) hits lands they will never see?
How come one child’s surgery assumes so much importance that money that could have almost paid for one such surgery is spent on phone calls, when a simple request for help for two little girls needs a Board of Directors to meet?
This is the result of giveBizMess, where what was intended to be an almost subliminal act becomes a pure commercial activity where every one wants its pound of flesh.
Giving is an act of love, an act where the only reward you can truly seek is the one you have to look for deep in the eyes of those you sought to help.
But it requires you to make the effort of looking into those eyes and the terrible risk of losing yourself in them!
note: the word bizMess is the brainchild of my friend DV; i just thought it fitted the picture like a glove!
by Anuradha Bakshi | Jun 3, 2005 | Uncategorized
what is essential is invisible to the eye..
was the secret the fox gave the little prince.
as i watched arun sleep today on his hospital bed, his heart beating valiantly and with great effort, these words came to my mind and i wondered what aruns’ heart had ‘seen’ till now.
adults for whom the dead were more important than the life of a child; adults who sat helpelessly cursing life and everything and everyone around but not really doing anything..
children play and run while this child lay helplessly just trying to get from one heartbeat to the nxt…
children learning while this child was stopped from going to school because he may have got hurt..
did arun question the unfairness of life..
or did he just smile thorugh it all with a wisdom born from years of suffering in silence, i do not know..
i still remember the first time i saw him: he just smiled and that smile conveyed everything he wanted to say. I knew arun wanted to live, to make up for the lost years, maybe to run and laugh like other children..
and i knew i would do everything i could to make it possible..
by Anuradha Bakshi | Jun 2, 2005 | girl child
look at this lovely face.. it belongs to Durga, our very own Utpal’s half sibling, and his only family!
this morning I was shocked to see large welts across this beautiful, innocent face… she had been beaten by her mother..
Durga’s story is what movies are made of.
Many years ago her mother, a child herself, was ‘married’ to a man in a remote village in Bengal. The man left the woman and never recognised the child. Another man wanted the woman but not the child. So Durga was left to the care of an ailing grandmother and a reluctant uncle, while the mother decided to live her own life..
Durga grew fromm child to ‘ little woman’ and somewhere along the way the grandmother died. The uncle was not willing to take on the responsibility of a young girl and Durga was packed to Delhi, to a family she never knew.
In the small room where they live, this young girl brought memories that the mother did not want revived, and the new ‘father’ found more ammunition for the unkind words hurled in drunken anger.
Yesterday, Durga was beaten, for being born, for being alive…
Did anyone hear her when she whispered: But I never asked to be born
